The Life of Hope (16 page)

“Even without getting into it.”

“This one does.”

I suspected that this was some clever trick of the LSD. “Some of these old religious guys tended to sublimate sexual urges,” I said in a grandiose, bullshitty way, “and often the language is couched in pseudosexual terminology.”

Sara began to read aloud. “ ‘Here follow the three stages of amorous congress. One, the simple presence of the male organ in the female reciprocator, followed by 2) a series of mutual motions followed by 3) a nervous reflex action or ejaculatory crisis which expels the seed.’ ”

“Exactly as I was saying. One might well think this person was actually talking about sex!”

“And making it sound like gobs of fun, too.” Sara read further. “ ‘The process of physical communion must be divided into two phases; amative and propagative. In order to raise the process to the level of spiritual perfection, the “amative” must be accentuated. Consider the analogous bodily act of ingestion. The food is chewed, subsequently swallowed. The first act is pleasurable, the second necessary to prolong existence. It affords
no pleasure, however, to swallow. The only manner of garnering more pleasure from the function of eating is to chew longer. This elevates the exercise to one of spirituality, for we are indulging in one of the Lord’s great boons. So be it with amorous congress. The sweetest and noblest period of intercourse is the moment of penetration and spiritual effusion, before the tedious muscular exercises begin. Therefore, this should be prolonged, the muscular exercises dispensed with. The method employed is one of concentration, what I shall call “wilful countenance.” Via this method I personally have been able to maintain an erection for hours, and to postpone ejaculation indefinitely! The communion with my sisters …’ ”

“Say again,” I put in.

“ ‘The communion with my sisters has become a thing of great spirituality, and not what intercourse so often is, a momentary affair terminating in exhaustion and disgust.’ ”

At that moment all hell broke loose in the room across from us. Three voices came all at once—Harvey screaming “Bitch!” over and over again, Lee countering every “Bitch!” with a “Bastard!” of equal venom, and Sheila sadly wailing.

“Oh-oh,” said sad Sara and I. I hopped into some pants, and we dashed over.

The three froze as soon as we opened the door, caught in the following tableau. Sheila was cowering on the ground, her arms folded to protect her head. Sheila’s body was red, violently red. Above her stood Harvey, a belt held swinging at his side. Harvey, I could see immediately, was crazed with alcohol and pharmaceuticals. (I noticed with a quick glance that the dresser’s mirror had been removed from the dresser and was lying in a corner, traces of white dust ghosting the glass.) Lee had Harvey’s arm in her mouth, and had bitten deeply enough that blood trickled slowly through the thick hair. All three were naked.

“Hi, Paulie,” said Harvey.

I moaned, “For fuck’s sake …”

“It’s this bitch!” Harvey pointed at Sheila and instantly became drugaddled and angry. “She sucked the life juices from me, and I couldn’t pork the other one!”

Lee let go of his arm. “That’s not her fault! You’re impotent!”

Harvey began to weep. “They’re all the frigging same. Women! They want your juices, they collect them, I don’t know what for, but they do!”

“I’m sorry,” whimpered Sheila.

“Bitch!” Harvey raised the belt again, Sheila tightened into a cowering ball and Lee reset her teeth. I caught Harvey’s wrist before the belt could come down.

Sara and Lee helped Sheila from the ground. It looked like Harvey had done some minor damage to her, nothing horrendously serious.

“I’m wise to you guys!” Harvey called menacingly as the three girls left the room. “You’re a, what-do-you-call-it, coven, right, of witch-bitches, and you suck out my very substance like I was a Tootsie-Pop or something! Just because you got tits and twats and stuff, you think you can get away with that shit!”

The girls slammed the door behind them.

“Come on, Harvard, cool it.”

“Did you pork that little bitch, Paulie?”

“I didn’t pork her …”

“Good for you. You’ve got to keep all your juices. They want them. I-I-I was gonna pork that Lee, right, but then that fat cunt Sheila sucked me off and I couldn’t! Bitch!”

I’d known Harvey for years, knew that the only way to get him off a train of thought was to seriously derail it. “Hey, Harv,” I asked, “what does ‘theocratic’ mean?”

Harvey Benson let the belt fall to the ground. “Want to do some cocaine, Paulie?”

“Okay.”

Harvey plodded over to the dresser, opened a drawer and got out the cocaine. Harvey had hidden the stuff in a rolled-up pair of dirty socks. Doing cocaine was the perfect activity for Harvey right then, because he loved the ceremony and ritual of dope-doing, and applied all of his concentration to it. Harvey took the little packet of cocaine over to the mirror and knelt down. He spilled some out on to the glass and then picked up a razor blade. Harvey began to chop at the crystals in a rapid and decisive way, forming it into lines, then shaving some off one, adding it to another, until the four runs of cocaine were perfectly equal.

This pleased Harvey immensely. He sat back on his pudgy, naked haunches with a lopsided grin. “Have some Lady C,” he instructed, picking up a ten-dollar bill and forming it into a straw. Harvey handed it to me.

I spent a long time looking at the lines, making sure they all were equal, because if one was heavy, even by a grain, I wanted it. Cocaine can turn bishops and cardinals into pig-fucking cutthroats, so imagine the effect on the likes of Benson and me. Satisfied that all the lines were the same, I stuck the bill in my nose and lowered my head, sucking half the line up my right nostril, half up the left, and then I spent several seconds racing over the surface of the mirror, vacuuming up the ghostly traces. I took the bill out of my nose and unrolled it, finding a few specks of white dust. I rubbed them off with my forefinger and then used this digit to massage my gums. Having done all that, I reluctantly rerolled the ten-spot and returned it to Harvey.

The doing of cocaine kept us in a state of near-silent activity for half an hour or so. Then I went to the kitchen and brought back up a bottle of whiskey and a case of beer, because I wanted to talk. I felt as if my Fairy Godmother had informed me, “Talk. I guarantee that you’ll say something beautiful and true.” As soon as I opened my mouth, I knew there was a catch. “But,” my Fairy Godmother had gone on, “mostly it’s gonna be ca-ca.”

“Harvard,” I began, feeling in my bones some stellar connection between fish, lunar cycles and beating women with a belt, “ummm …” It was hard to formulate a statement based on those three components. I selected one as the most important. “Fish!” I shouted, taking a sip of beer.

“Hey,” said Harvey, “what did God say when Eve went swimming?”

Harvey didn’t want to speak beautiful truisms, he wanted to tell jokes. I was deeply saddened. “Heard it,” I mumbled, which was the truth. Edgar the axe-murderer had told it to me.

“Of a theocracy, obviously,” Harvey piped up. “A government or state in which God is the sovereign and religion the law.”

I scowled. “I don’t get it. ’Snot funny.”

“ ’Snot a joke, asswipe. Didn’t you just ask what theocratic meant?”

“Right. What does it mean?”

“What I just fucking said.”

“God as the sovereign and religion the law,” I repeated. “Do they have a theocracy anywhere?” If they did, I thought, it might be a nice place to visit, maybe even settle down.

“A succubus, that’s what she is. Sucking the life right out of me.”

“Oh, shut up, Harvard. All it was was a blow job. Most guys would be glad to get a blow job, but not you.” This reminded me of something. “Hey! There’s a guy in town who’s got a stone boner!”

“Say what?”

“He’s a stone guy, that’s why he’s got a stone boner. The town founder, J. B. Hope. Maybe he can find a stone lady to give him a blow job.” I opened another beer. I now had five nearly full beer bottles in a strange configuration around me. The stone lady image made me think of Elspeth. I considered commissioning a marble statue, one that would lock Ellie and I together forever in carnal embrace.

“Rub it,” commanded Harvey Benson.

“Rub what?”

“Rub the stone boner. It’s good luck.”

“It is?”

“Sure. Ask anybody around here. Why, every year after a farmer plants his tobaccy, he drives into town to rub Joseph’s dick.”

“Who’s Joseph?”

“Joseph Benton Hope. J. B. Hope.”

“Oh, right, yeah, got you.”

“Or, on the night before her wedding, a girl always goes to the Square to give Joseph’s dick a little rub.”

“Hey,” I remembered happily, “I did rub it.”

Harvey dealt me a strange, cruel look. “You didn’t even know it was good luck and you rubbed it anyway? That’s pretty weird!”

“I just wanted to make sure it was really there.”

“It’s really there.”

“He’s the town founder, right? Sara found a book in my room, and it had about Hope in it. Hope the town.”

Harvey leaned forward and grinned. “You mean you don’t
know about this place yet? How Joe Benton Hope and his so-called Perfectionists settled here? How they practiced complex marriage, wilful countenance and stirpiculture?”

“Fishing, you mean?”

I had unsuspectingly hit a bull’s-eye, tapped into some motherlode of drug-induced lunacy. Benson jumped on to his feet and let loose with a horrible cry, simultaneously jubilant and inhuman. “Fishing!” bellowed Harvey. “Let’s go the fuck fishing!!”

I considered it and began to chortle. “Ol’ Mossback,” I whispered lowly. “Let’s go get Ol’ Mossback.”

And singing the theme music from
Jaws
all the way (bum-
bum
bum
bum
) Harv and I mopedaled to Lookout Lake.

I was considerably more taken with Lookout Lake on this, my second visit. God seemed to be hard at work, although I suspected Him of drunkenness. The sun had risen, reluctantly and sleepy-eyed, and seemed to be on the verge of saying, “Fuggit,” leaving the pale blue sky to the moon. The moon, by the way, was still floating about the world, looking like a photograph scotch-taped to a bedroom wall. Still, the lake gave the impression of industriousness, infested with hobgoblins and elves making hay while the humans slept, while the humans dreamed their tiny dreams.

Cocaine is an impish drug, in that while your nose is full of it, your body and sensibilities acquire a magical resistance to alcohol. “Another beer and a shot of Scotch? Sure, send it down,
no problem, we won’t even notice!” Then, of course, the cocaine pulls out with a sardonic chuckle, rendering you instantaneously plastered. This is what happened to me out at Lookout Lake, and I sat down on one of the lunar rocks grinning, telling myself that I’d found a fine rock and that there was no earthly reason for me to vacate the rock until sometime around the next Ice Age.

Harvey Benson was more active. “Paulie!” he said, assembling his tackle with great expertise, “we got to take off all of our clothes!”

“Why for?”

“Because Ol’ Mossback, he’s a cagey bastard, he can hear the rustle of material, and then he knows that people is after his ass.” Harvey was already butt-naked, I noticed, and it occurred to me that if Ol’ Mossback could hear clothes rustling he could also certainly hear the breeze whistling through Benson’s body hair. Still, I’m a good sport, ask anybody. I slipped out of my clohes and thought of Elspeth.

I remembered Ellie and me skinny-dipping in some northern lake, remembered the way the silver water ran between her breasts. Actually, though, this was complete fabrication, because Elspeth would never do it. “Swim in a
lake?
” Elspeth would shriek. “It’s all full of things!”

Elspeth has an unnatural fear of “things.” She can always account for specific fears, citing past experiences, all of which have the quality of nightmares suffered by a three-year-old. For example, she wouldn’t go skinny-dipping in a lake because, “Once I got a leech on my leg that was about a foot long!” or, “A cousin of mine had all of his toes bitten off by a huge snapping turtle!”

“Hey, don’t laugh. Some of those snappers are very nasty!”

“Say what?”

Harvey was busy executing the butt-naked overhand cast. He planted the Hoper far out in the middle of the lake and let it sink a bit. Then, retrieving it slowly, he asked, “Huh?”

“You just say sumpin’?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

Neither would Elspeth engage in the skinny aspects of the
dipping. Even if I convinced her to enter a lake full of “things,” she would dash off into the woods and come back wearing a severe one-piece suit, goggles and a flowered bathing-cap, looking as if she intended to conquer the English Channel.

I looked down upon my own nakedness and giggled. Something struck me as humorous.

Harvey walked up to me and demanded the bottle of Scotch. “Haven’t you had enough?” I asked, something I say to my friends when I’m convinced, against all logic and odds, that I haven’t.

“The thing about it is,” said Harvey, grabbing the bottle out of my hands, “Ol’ Mossback is very sensitive to the presence of human beings.”

“Unlike some people I know,” Harvey seemed to add under his breath. Benson took a long pull at the whisky. “See,” he continued, “when you drink alcohol quickly, it lowers the body temperature. So this way, Ol’ Mossback won’t even know we’re here!”

“I’ll bet Red Fisher don’t know about that one,” I said, getting back the bottle. I had a healthy measure of whisky, hoping to lower my body temperature.

Well, I don’t know about body temperature, but it sure hammered down my IQ. I lay back on my rock and fell into a sort of sleep.

So, ah, you married?

Yes. But she gave me the boot.